There’s
been quite a bit of speculation about Donald Trump’s historical
precursors, from Emperor Nero to Führer Hitler and Governor George
Wallace. Though he shares some of Nero’s populism and quirky
personality traits, Hitler’s knack for branding, and Wallace’s
pugnacious racism, Trump is a man of this media-driven moment. He has
much in common with Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of
Italy, who like Trump, made a fortune before entering politics, knows
how to work the media, and represents the rise of the anti-politics
politician.

As for
parallels from the past, Trump reminds me in several ways of George
Patton (1885-1945), the American general known by military men as Old
Blood and Guts, whose larger-than-life persona has been aggrandized
in an Oscar-winning movie, museums, children’s books, motivational
manuals, and cyberspace. He was “one of America’s greatest
soldiers, a genuine hero,” according to a HBO documentary. A
Time-Life book compared him to Babe Ruth coming up to the plate:
“Here’s a big guy who’s going to kick hell out of something.”

Like
Trump, the general was born with a gold spoon in his mouth. George
inherited wealth from his father who made money in Southern
California’s land deals, vineyards, and oil investments. When
Patton married Beatrice Banning Ayer in 1910, his considerably
wealthier father-in-law put him on the family payroll and subsidized
a coddled military career, complete with traveling servants, a stable
of horses, and all the trappings of minor aristocracy. He grew up
with Mexican servants at home, Black maids at the Virginia Military
Institute, and a personal Chinese cook in the army.

Like
Trump, Patton’s rightwing politics was based on a US-centric
nationalism and an unabashed, racial worldview. He had a taste for
authoritarian regimes that promoted anti-democratic policies. “To
Hell with the people,” he confided in his father. He dismissed
“sexless” pacifists as having the “back bone of a jelly fish.”
In his personal copy of Mein Kampf,
he underlined Hitler’s assertion that “a Majority can never be a
substitute for the Man.”

Patton
was an equal opportunity hater. As a staunch supporter of the
Confederacy, one of his favorite films was “Birth of a Nation.”
During the war he remained convinced that “a colored soldier cannot
think fast enough to fight in armor.” To Patton, Arabs were “a
mixture of all the bad races on earth.” At the end of the war, he
regarded Jews as a “sub-human species” and Germans as “the only
decent people left in Europe.”

Like
Trump, Patton had a particular animus for Mexico. In the 1910s, he
advocated imperialist annexation. “If we take the country,” he
wrote his father, “we could settle it and these people would be
happier and better off.” When he was assigned to the Eighth Cavalry
Regiment on the Texas border, he celebrated killing two Mexican
soldiers by cutting notches in the grip of his revolver and strapping
the dead men to the hoods of car like deer. “I feel about it just
as I did when I got my first fish,” he wrote his wife.

Like
Trump, Patton was known for his public bravura and crude bluster.
“Patton didn’t give a damn about keeping anything secret,” the
Third Army’s historian, Hugh Cole, told me. His flamboyance made
him, as Life magazine
noted, “the pet of all the newspapermen.” Patton’s boss, Dwight
Eisenhower, considered him a brilliant military strategist, but an
impulsive narcissist who could not resist making off-the-cuff
comments to the press corps. When he expressed his anti-Soviet and
anti-Semitic views in public in 1945, Eisenhower berated his
indiscretions and transferred him to a desk job. Patton blamed the
“non-Aryan press” for plotting his demise.

Unlike
Trump, Patton didn’t enter politics. But it was on his mind in 1945
when he died in a car accident. If he had lived, it’s likely that
he would have followed the lead of many former high-ranking officers
who joined corporate boards, became cabinet members and ambassadors,
and repositioned themselves as Cold War warriors. His rightwing
supporters, including the racist Mississippi Congressman John Rankin,
floated his name as Secretary of War and pitched the idea of a run
for Congress.

Patton
believed in reincarnation and thought that he might have been
Hannibal and an English knight in previous lives. Who knows, maybe
he’s returned, ready to spill our blood with his guts.